Why would anyone hack my website? It doesn’t have anything that could benefit them.

We’ve all heard of popular and busy websites getting hacked and private data being stolen - member login data, credit card numbers, and sensitive personally-identifiable data. A well-known example was Yahoo hacked in 2016 - data from at least 500 million accounts stolen. It’s obvious why a hacker would be interested in compromising those systems. But it’s not only top websites that are targeted. All public-facing websites are subject to constant attack.

Maybe your website doesn’t have thousands of login accounts storing sensitive personal data of your users, but there are many other things a hacker can use. Most of which you probably have no idea of.

Internet security is a fast-moving challenge with new threats found almost every week. Google blacklists close to 10,000 websites a week for malware and flags over 20,000 for phishing. But you don’t have to be one of them. Take proactive steps to repel the threat.

It’s impossible to reduce your risk to zero, but you can drastically reduce it by taking appropriate precautions. Most websites are hacked due to misconfiguration, out-of-date software, and/or bad quality hosting.